Access Desires

So you are thinking about revamping your website?

Why are you revamping? Are you bored with your current site already? Or do you think it could look better?

Whatever you have in mind, the bottom line is: You want to revamp your website and you are certain it will work. But it cannot work if you don’t carry out the renovation correctly. Below are steps that will help you to ensure a successful website revamp:

• Set Clear Goals

Your website is naturally the determinant of how many leads you generate. Therefore, as you think about redesigning your website, generating as many leads as possible should be at the top of your mind.

Think about the business goals and then what you aim to achieve by redesigning your website. Set clear and SMART goals concerning the new site.

2. Take the Stock of Existing Site

Up until now, you have been building assets each day with the best intentions. These assets include blogs, inbound links and the content. You don’t want all that to go to waste. In fact, you want to use those assets to build a better and more functional website.

To protect these assets, take a stock of them and ensure that they link into the redesigned website.

3. Develop the Buyer Personas

Before you can create content that engages with the reader and finally makes them consumers, you will need to have buyer personas. The content should always speak to these personas.

To create these personas, start with interviewing people closest to you. These are people inside the company or family members. Then interview those customers you want to keep – your favourite. After that go to social media and study your competitors concerning what they are discussing with their customers. Most importantly find your potential customers’ problems and ensure that the redesigned website will help you solve their problems. Gather all this information and it’s time to create your buyer personas.

4. Research

After giving the necessary focus to your customer, site assets and business goals, it’s time you learn about the competitor. What are they doing?

Visit their website and blogs, read their content, understand their content offers, keywords and watch their videos.  This is important if you are to make good decisions regarding your website revamp.

5. Put Down a Plan

After researching, bring together the information and create the website revamp plan. This is the blueprint you will follow in the redesign project.

6. Map the Navigation

Just like in house renovation where you design each room by itself, create a flow and bring in the furniture, design each page of your website the same way. Focus on each page as a single element then the navigation between the different pages and fill each of them with necessary content. Remember the content assets you took stock of? Keep them in mind at this stage.

7. Site Wireframes

After mapping out the navigation in the website, you will need to mock-up every page. Essentially, your site wireframes are your new site’s blueprint.

Mock-up every page and show where header images, content, CTAs and navigation will go. This is very important.

8. Create Content Early Enough

Most people leave this step until they are “done with everything else.” But this is not wise. In fact, you should create content for the redesigned site as early as the planning process. This is important as you can test the new content alongside the design.

9. Scoping

The last step is where you get to know what everyone else thinks about the new site. Make sure to get consensus with other decision makers before you start redesigning.

In Conclusion

Redesigning a website is a great idea to help your brand remain fresh and competitive online. However, doing it without a laid out plan makes the whole process pointless and even worse than keeping your current website. If you have to do it, make sure you do it right.